


Being Tired, or Being Alive

by jin_bestgirl



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Other, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:28:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26114194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jin_bestgirl/pseuds/jin_bestgirl
Summary: "His own fingers curve around the shape of Erwin’s, holding him to his chest, pressing Erwin into himself. Levi draws in another deep breath, thick and uneven, and closes his burning eyes to focus, focus hard on the feeling of being in the presence of someone alive, alive, alive, alive."**spoilers for AOT season 1**
Relationships: Levi/Erwin Smith
Comments: 34
Kudos: 326





	Being Tired, or Being Alive

Levi is tired. 

His body feels over-heavy, like he’s dragging more than one person through the doorway of his quarters as he steps inside, like there are other people crushed up inside of him pulling him down, down, perhaps to hell. He half-wishes they would. The joints in his arms are battered and aching and the joints in his legs are numb; his head feels swollen and pounds with the beat of his heart, thumping on unsympathetically, reminding him that he is alive, _you are alive, you are alive and they are not, but you are alive, you sorry bastard._

He is a wash of conflict, pain and numbness mingling in his mind and body- a walking contradiction. He tilts his head back a little and the crown of it brushes the narrow width of the door, still ajar behind him. Levi breathes, it’s hard to. 

Moving independently of his mind, nimble fingers work quickly at the harness around his chest, making to unclip the buckles, tugging at the leather. There’s an urgency in the movements that doesn’t seem to belong to him, a panic his unit might deem uncharacteristic but he obeys because he is alone, and because he is suddenly so alarmingly claustrophobic. 

When the leather clasp snags halfway out Levi draws in a deep and measured breath, an attempt at something like patience, and nudges the door shut behind him with his foot. A new silence settles into the room, a type of quiet that feels smaller somehow than the previous quiet had. The leather strap stays locked in position as he tugs, and Levi steels himself against the sudden churning swirl of anxiety in his stomach as it’s born into the pit of him, ebbing and flowing, ebbing and flowing again. 

Deep breaths are the key- it’s a childish and overstated piece of advice but there’s a reason for its universality. There’s a reason he tells his squad to take deep breaths when they’re panicked, a reason they cling to it like religion, elementary as it is. He takes the advice himself now, breathing deep and focusing in on the buckle, the bloodstained metal ignorant of the distress it’s alighting in his chest and the bizarre chaos it’s releasing his mind as he struggles to free himself. _Or maybe it’s enjoying itself_ , he thinks with a grim humor. _Maybe it’s punishing me._

Despite these renewed efforts the buckle remains stuck, looped through the metal at an odd angle so that he has to work to dig it out if he hopes for release. Senselessly the disquiet swells in him, a feeling without reason. The straps, usually so innocuously wrapped around his chest, are suddenly burning into him through the shirt. He can feel every inch of the material as if it’s been clasped onto him for the first time, as if he doesn’t wear this every dark day of his unsparing life, and suddenly he wants to rip it, to tear it away so that he doesn’t have to feel it anymore. 

“Get a fucking grip,” he says out loud to himself, in a low and dangerous voice, hoping it might sound foreign enough to snap him out of whatever this is- he doesn’t normally talk when he’s alone. There’s a moment of relative stillness, almost as if someone else had spoken. Levi closes his eyes and furrows his twitching eyebrows. It’s pacific for a moment, and then the anxiety swirls in him again, unchanged. The buckle stays stuck, unmoved by the tragedy of the situation. 

With a breathless curse he abandons the pursuit of the harness in exchange for the removal of his boots; this is something he can do. He’s out of them in seconds without even bending down. Forsaking their usual neat place by the doorway, aligned and polished and ready to march out again, Levi kicks them off so that they scatter across the room and leaves them where they’ve fallen, like dead soldiers across a battlefield. 

_Like Petra._

The thought surges forward unwarranted but not unexpected, and Levi’s ready when it comes. He braces against it, against the same brand of anguish that had swamped him in the forest, gulped at his ankles and clutched up to his heart like ice, trying to get a grip, to pull him down. He had swallowed it hard then, shoved it neatly away like his shoes, and carried onward without as much as an outward falter. An art, Hanji calls it, his ability to do that. He smiles darkly whenever they say it; he’s never seen it that way.

Levi stalks over to the window, his quick footfalls devoid of the grace so typical of him; they are hard and careless against the wood of the floor. Something is writhing in him, some wild animal, and he is ill-equipped to let it out to roam. Not here, not now. He will not allow it out until he chooses; he will not be made to play subordinate to his emotions, he will not be made to lose control. He bends feeling to fit his will, not the other way around; he will not be made to adjust his standard to fit this circumstance. 

Levi begins to pace, running a hand up through his hair and down to his neck, pressing into the short hairs there, focusing in on them for the sake of focusing on something. The images are swelling, pressing at his subconscious with an adamance, begging to be acknowledged. He swipes his hand through his hair again, and again after that, completing his fourth round across the small room, stepping over a discarded shoe, a discarded body _like_ _Petra and Oruo and Eld._

“Don’t.”

He speaks again to the empty room, to himself but no one, and as the word drops through the silence like a weight it feels ridiculous but it also feels like it’s helped something somehow. So he says it again, quieter but firmer, and the images, caught like sickening snapshots, bend under the renewed wave of strength that jolts through him as he presses the word into the air for his own sake. 

After a wavering, concerning moment, Levi manages indeed to “ _get a fucking grip_ ,” to take hold and keep it all at bay again like it’s something alive, like Titans. With this crushing mental grasp on the unfathomable he makes a sudden turn for the desk in the corner, where it stands pressed up against the wall. It’s a blind movement, carried out by something dark and desperate in him, an instinct, maybe, to seek out distraction. He follows numbly. 

As Levi reaches the desk his fingertips skim across the papers strewn about the smooth wooden surface, sleeping there where they had been left yesterday, or maybe the day before that. He stands behind the chair, hips pressing into the wood like the straps press into his shoulders, his back. He breathes deep again, the sound filling the room as the soft shifting of papers scratches against the desk. The breath feels too shallow, like his lungs are already half full with something else that stands in the way of the air. With one hand Levi makes another half-hearted attempt to unfasten the buckle at his chest, but it doesn’t budge. The images press hard against his throat and chest again, and again he sidesteps them as skillfully as the last time, casting them far and away. Again, again he thinks that he will let them come, but they will come on his terms. 

His calloused fingers, scarred and dirty from the hell of the last outing, drift over leather bound books, stiff and proper like soldiers, waiting dutifully to be plucked out and read again. Levi slips one out, a little navy thing with a gold imprint on the cover, and flips pointlessly through it, words and images bouncing through and away from him without being processed. He slots it back into the spot he’d drawn it away from. He may as well have not picked it up all. 

Levi scrubs a hand down his weary face. His eyes burn from being open too long. He wishes he could shut them, shut out the light and noise for just a few minutes. He wishes he could release the pressure in the base of his throat, building slowly and dangerously with nowhere to go. He wishes this goddamn buckle would come off so he might take off the fucking harness. He wishes, he wishes. 

Levi moves away from the desk and it happens- a pen cascades from the bed of papers, matte black with a gold strip around the smooth cap and a scuff down one side from a tumble it had taken ages ago. Levi turns and stares at it, and the distance between them makes it feel like it’s staring back. The room is so quiet, and Levi feels like something has dropped out of the bottom of him. He’s falling as he stands rooted to the spot, staring at the thing. A chill creeps up his spine as a pit carves itself deeper into his stomach, a dance of opposites alive in him as he thinks about the last time- he can’t stop the thought, he does not possess enough mental control for this- he thinks about the last time he had touched that pen. 

He steps forward, just one small step, and dips down to remove it from the ground. It’s smooth against his fingertips but he can feel the scratch from the fall, not this fall but the fall from months ago. It’s cool to the touch now, the warmth of Eld’s grip long since faded. The room is too quiet to be any kind of comfortable. Levi sways and for a moment he is weak. 

They come then, hard and furious and brilliantly colored, the images- it’s Eld against the springy grass, splattered with his own shade of deep red, Oruo facedown in his own pooling mess, Petra, young Petra, bent at unnatural angles against the indifferent bark of a tree, unseeing eyes fixated somewhere too far away to see with the naked eye, with a living eye. Her blood had streaked so far up the trunk. Levi can’t imagine how hard she must have hit it for it to spray like that. Their bodies had been one thing; he’s seen bodies before, he’s seen lots of bodies before, but their faces- for those he had failed to ready himself. Their once-familiar features, made hollow alien and cast in wax by the icy clutch of death, had stared at him in vacant horror, perhaps wondering in their final moments just how he had let them down. 

Levi grips the pen in his hand so tightly that his knuckles bloom white against the beige of his skin. Eld had laughed far too hard trying to toss it back through the window that day, and had missed his mark three times with devastating inaccuracy. Levi’s mouth had twitched up as he looked down and the three of them had cheered in victory from below, finding the half-smile of their captain an unprecedented success. Eld and Petra and Oruo had all laughed far harder than the situation had warranted, and for that he had almost smiled. The moment feels like a dream now, fuzzy around the edges, and bloodstained. 

A coughing kind of sob rips itself from Levi’s chest, forcing its way out with such sudden harshness that Levi finds his own hand at the base of his throat as if he’s just been struck there by a stranger. He inhales, sharp and uncontrolled, and swallows hard against the lump in his throat. He pushes back against it, pushes, pushes hard. _On his terms, it will come on his terms, not now and not like this._

“Don’t,” he says again, voice thick with the effort of holding the tide. It’s a command.

He shoves the pen back down on the desk, and after a moment’s pregnant pause, pushes it hard so that it skirts across the surface like an ice skater before tumbling off the opposite side, down, down the crevice between the desk and the wall, out of sight, out of mind, except that it’s not out of mind, none of it is; their smiles are lodged right at the vanguard of his consciousness, their smiles and the fucking pen, and he can’t breathe right and the harness won’t come off and it’s strangling him-

_Knock knock._

Levi freezes, aching body rigid and weary eyes wide. His heart is in his throat, caught in a web of suppressed sensation, and he curses inwardly at the shameful nonperformance of his reaction time. Quickly he pulls himself together, internally mirroring the external as he smoothes down the front of his shirt and pushes his sleeves up his scarred arms. Levi runs his fingers through his hair and comes to the dismal realization that his hand is shaking. He clutches his own wrist in his other hand, the dull panic that grips right around his Adam's apple and blooms in his chest frustratingly disobedient. It locks there in place and he knows with grim admittance that it’s winning. There’s no time to play by his own rules anymore, he must cater to the whim of the emotional, must degrade himself to maintain face. It’s shameful, really. Levi grimaces unpleasantly and forces the words out, masking a strained voice with a bitter disguise of something near normalcy. 

“State yourself.” 

He can hear his own voice in his ears against the rush of blood. He sounds like a fraud; he sounds weak. How disappointing. 

“Erwin.”

_For fuck’s sake._

Levi shakes his head, small, private, pointless, willing away Erwin and willing away the world for a long moment, like a child. Suddenly the captain in him, supine and suffering but alive, sparks to life and assumes control. Levi’s body moves without conscious choice again, propelling him to snatch the boots from where they lie cascaded unceremoniously across the floor. He awakens, almost, as if from another dream, seeing the mess of the room as if for the first time, catching the mess of himself in the small rectangular mirror on the wall and not recognizing the jaded, shadowed face that stares back at him. 

“Enter,” he hears himself say a hundred miles away, and he stares at himself in the mirror as a wash of nonplussed indifference creeps across his features, hiding it all, so thinly veiled. 

What a fraud he is. 

The disguise would be enough for almost anyone except maybe two people in this world, but that isn’t good enough now, isn’t nearly good enough because one of the two people is standing on the other side of the door. He wonders vaguely if it will be sufficient for this small exchange. He breathes in fast and hard and tears himself away from the mirror. He will have to make it sufficient; Erwin cannot know. 

The commander, tall and regal in stature as he ever is, opens the door and then halts abruptly in the frame. Levi opens his mouth to make some lazy, half-formed quip about coming in or out and making up your goddamn mind when his chest seizes and he realizes far too late that he’s still clutching one shoe in each hand, standing there strangely.

It’s over before it’s begun. 

It’s so minor- what a common thing, to be caught changing in the middle of personal quarters- except not for him, not for them. Levi’s grip tightens around the material of the boots as he feels all pretense melt away. There’s no faking it now. To be caught half-undone in front of Erwin is to be caught entirely in pieces. 

“What do I have to fix now?” Levi huffs but his voice is too hard and wrong; it’s a pathetic attempt at regaining some sort of foothold and he knows before it’s out that it won’t work. He doesn’t miss the way Erwin takes him in, quick analysis ticking away in his clear blue eyes; Erwin doesn’t try to hide it from him, either. All Levi can do is stand there and keep his expression in check as he’s scanned for imperfections, scrutinized for defects, to pretend like everything is as fine as it ever can be though he’s slipping away from himself inside and suddenly understands how powerless he is against the real weight of the emotion, how futile and ridiculous it had been to assume that anything about this would be on his terms. He hasn’t been in control since the moment he had spotted Eld’s carcass strewn across the ground like a ragdoll, he’s known it and rejected it but the truth is here now, spitting in his face. 

Erwin, pillar of stability and so humiliatingly different from Levi right now in his stoicism, opens his mouth and then closes it again. Levi watches like a spectator at the funeral for the death of his pride as something flickers in his commander’s expression. It’s a shadow of curiosity, the subtletest inkling of something too close to pity, and that makes Levi so sick. He’s been compromised, exposed and laid at the mercy of Erwin’s whim. All Erwin need do is ask if he is okay and the truth will be so brutally obvious that Levi will need not answer. Levi stands there helplessly, one shoe in each hand, pathetic, awaiting condemnation. 

The room is silent. Erwin stares at him for a long time, shifting his calculating gaze from Levi’s boots to his harness and finally up, up to what Levi is certain is a rigid and unconvincing expression. So much for impassivity. 

Erwin opens his mouth again, but when he speaks this time his voice is uncharacteristically gentle and unnecessarily kind. He does not ask if Levi is okay, and he does not ask if anything is wrong. Instead he says, plainly and without condescension:

“...Do you need help?” 

Levi is startled into deeper silence. For a moment a numbness spreads across his chest, blossoming outward from his heart like a quick-acting poison, swelling out to the very tips of his fingers. And then it begins to fade, to ebb quickly back like the tide, and he is horrified to discover that it leaves in its wake a pull towards tears, a stinging flash of the images of his dead comrades, of his decimated squadron, and the pinpricks jab at his eyes and it’s still hard to breathe deeply, and the straps press into his back and against his shoulders, pushing him in and pushing him down. He opens his mouth and closes it again, and his hands are now shaking where they clutch the boots. His throat feels tight and his heart thunders in his ears because he is standing at the brink of his dignity, fucking around at the edge of it like he might just jump off, like it might be the only option. 

“I can’t… get the fucking harness off,” Levi finally manages in a tight voice, and jerks his head away to hide the burn of the tears. It’s a close thing. The silence following is deafening, and he tries to take in a slow breath but it’s far too shaky for that, and it makes a damn sound, a sharp, violent rasp of one. He turns back to Erwin but not his face, no, anything but- his shoes, his belt buckle, the crease in his right sleeve. The muscles in Levi's jaw contort with the effort of maintaining his expression and composure and it’s almost too much to hold onto. The threat of the unthinkable alternative is all that stands between Levi and giving in to it, letting it wash him away to a place he hasn’t visited in years. 

When the image of Erwin suddenly blurs again before him, he turns his head too sharply to hide his eyes as his chest constricts and stays that way. He knows with a new kind of dread that it won’t revert until he lets it go, until the tears fall. He’s never been so disappointed. 

Levi can’t look back now so he stares at the window’s melting shape, though the game is already up, though the mask had dropped the moment Erwin had walked in and found Levi standing there holding his shoes like a lost little boy. There’s another long moment of stillness and silence.

Wordlessly, then, and without so much as an audible breath, Erwin closes the door and crosses the still space to stand before Levi. Levi catches his scent as Erwin looms before him, musk and peppermint and gunpowder. He’s much closer than usual, closer than standard. Levi keeps his head turned away and chin tilted up as the tears begin to blind him, and it’s so shamefully obvious as the images of his dead squadron blaze ungoverned across his mind like a flipbook. 

Then, without saying anything, Erwin begins to work at the stuck buckle. The contact is jarring and unexpected, and Levi can feel the slight tug of the straps against him and he sways a little on the spot, staring fixedly at the window as if it’s the only thing in the world, helpless victim to the managed sobs that silently grip his throat and claw their way up through his chest, which feels like it might burst. A warm tear finally slides down his cheek, the first to escape the ranks of the subdued, and it drips off down the center of his chin. Erwin works quietly and carefully to unfasten Levi, knuckles and fingertips brushing gently against his chest as Levi stands there holding his shoes like they matter. The contact is overwhelming. 

Suddenly, a sob stronger than the last one wrenches its way through his iron jaw with a mind of its own, and before he can stop it Levi hears himself like he’s a third party in the room, the rough sound filling the space in a way that might have humiliated him a few minutes ago, but in the face of this Erwin continues his work quietly and that is enough, it is more than enough exhortation for the rest of the tears, and Levi breaks like a dam, beginning to cry freely, staring out the window he can no longer piece together through the tears as Erwin fusses patiently with the straps holding him together. 

It’s something out of body; he can’t remember the last time he’s cried and he knows he’s never cried in front of anyone before, but here they are and there’s nothing to be done but continue to do it, to let himself drown in the memory of his team, in the cruel twist of his failure, relishing the way it’s broken him down. The tears feel like they’ve come out of the past, pieces of him long since abandoned awakening to add their misery to this moment. 

The straps suddenly lift from his shoulders, freeing him, and Levi draws in a shuddering breath, the first one that feels deep since he left on the mission this morning. He blinks hard and the window capturing the fading day comes into better focus. Tears streak down both sides of his face but he doesn’t make an attempt to wipe them away, there’s no point to it. 

Erwin doesn’t take the harness off for him and Levi is indescribably grateful for the way his commander leaves him that small dignity; he reaches up and pulls it down and off of himself, shrugging it away so that it slides down around one wrist. He drops the boots on either side of himself with dull clunks, and finally, finally, the pressure in his chest begins to release. 

It seems that he slips from dream to dream lately, ghosting across the surface of reality. When he comes to the realization that Erwin’s hand has lingered on his chest, warm and sturdy, Levi awakens to this fact as if out of another dream. Erwin’s touching him over his heart, simple and soft, and his chest swoops with the mystery of a new lightness before fading quickly back into the dark. His jaw works tightly and then, almost unconsciously but not quite, he presses forward, leans into the touch and closes his eyes tightly, head still turned away- no, he cannot look at Erwin, but he can do this. 

The hand that’s free of the responsibility of the limp harness comes up to cover Erwin’s, and none too gently. Levi clutches onto Erwin’s lean fingers and heavy hand like it’s tethering him to the spot, perhaps because it is. His own fingers curve around the shape of Erwin’s, holding him to his chest, pressing Erwin into himself. Levi draws in another deep breath, thick and uneven, and closes his burning eyes to focus, focus hard on the feeling of being in the presence of someone alive, alive, alive, alive. 

They stand there like that for a moment, probably too long of one, but Levi couldn’t give a shit now. It feels like a lifetime wrapped in a moment, an eternity spent reveling in this breath of peace amidst the chaos and pain, a moment of respite in the eye of the hurricane, and Erwin spends it with him wordlessly, without question, without the need to know. Erwin knows all too well already; Levi understands this without needing to ask if he does. 

When Levi finally lets go of Erwin and opens his eyes, his breathing has calmed and the barest edge of rationality has reclaimed a corner of his mind, enough of it to clear his throat and finally, finally turn to look Erwin in the eyes with his own hardened, reddened ones. Erwin only retracts his touch when their eyes meet, when the barest semblance of regularity creeps back into this encounter. 

“Is there business to attend to?” Levi forces out, and it’s almost laughable in light of what’s just transpired here but he holds his expression firm, slots his jaw in a lock. His voice still sounds weak and unnatural but it's better, and he doesn’t need to hide the pain in it this time because his commander has just stared into the face of it. 

Erwin looks at Levi levelly for a long moment, not with pity but with simple care. 

“Later,” he says, and when Levi opens his mouth to counter this, Erwin shakes his head slowly once, firmly. “Later.” 

They hold each other’s gaze for a long moment before Levi concedes, inclining his head only barely in silent agreement and wondering madly how he had thought for an instant that he could maintain this peace long enough to bear business again so immediately. 

Erwin stands there a few seconds longer, eyes hard with a covert intention. Levi looks steadily back, taking it in, understanding what’s being said without the saying. And then Erwin turns and goes, closing the door quietly and carefully behind him, leaving Levi with his boots and his pen and his harness and the images, duller now, of the people who had died today like they all seem to do. 

Clinging with his being to the lingering warmth over his heart and too weary to shame himself for the indulgence, Levi retreats to his bed and clutches onto the bedpost. He reels quietly for a moment and furrows his brows, drifting back as close as he dares to that moment of purest release, of sobbing and staring out the window. It seems he can’t get close enough to tap into it again; only the ghost of it remains. He feels emptied. 

Levi draws in another deep breath, newly freed from the clutches of the harness. He wonders what business awaits him when he manages to grow a set of balls and pull himself back together, when he heads back out the door with his boots back on his feet and an appropriate expression back on his face. He’s regained a sense of calm. It’s not complete but it’s enough for now, and it will be enough to last him another few tearless years. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you guys for reading- I hope you enjoyed. I figured this man just needed a good damn cry and if he wasn't going to do it himself I had to do it for him. Feel free to leave kudos if you liked, or if you didn't!


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